Kolkata Panchang, 21 December 2027

The five windows in Kolkata on 21 December 2027

In clock order through the day. Which numbered eighth of daylight Rahu Kaal, Gulika and Yamaghanta each take is fixed by the weekday rather than by the clock, and no two weekdays share the assignment: on a Tuesday Rahu Kaal is the 7th of the eight, Gulika the 5th and Yamaghanta the 3rd. Sunrise 06:11 to sunset 16:56 is 10h 45m, so an eighth of it runs 80.6 minutes and a fifteenth — which is what Abhijit is — runs 43 minutes. The Length column is the gap between two endpoints each rounded to the whole minute, which is why the three eighths below read 81 minutes apiece.

The convention the classical almanacs record is that nothing new is begun inside Rahu Kaal, Gulika or Yamaghanta, and that Abhijit and Brahma muhurat are the day’s two settled windows — Brahma muhurat being the ninety-six minutes ending at sunrise, which is why it is the one window here whose length never changes with the season. What the tradition does not do is grade the rest of the day, and neither does this page. Choosing a window for a purpose needs a chart as well as a clock.

What a national panchang gets wrong in Kolkata today

The column on the right is the site’s own national table for 21 December 2027, computed for New Delhi from the JPL DE421 ephemeris — the numbers /panchang/2027-12-21/ actually prints. It is the same table almost every panchang in the vertical is a copy of. Every limb on it is right for Kolkata; every time on it is wrong, and the last column is by how much.

The widest of them on 21 December 2027 is Sunrise, which a national table places 58 minutes later than Kolkata's. Longitude explains most of it: Kolkata sits 11.15° east of New Delhi, and four minutes per degree is the whole of the local-time correction. The rest is latitude, which does not shift sunrise so much as stretch the day — and because Rahu Kaal is a fraction of that day rather than a span on a clock, a stretched day moves the window further than it moves sunrise. That is why the difference in the table above is not one number repeated seven times.

An eighth of the day is not ninety minutes

Rahu Kaal, Gulika and Yamaghanta are each one eighth of the interval from sunrise to sunset. That is a definition, not an approximation, and it means the length of each is a property of the day rather than a fixed quantity anyone can print once. A table quoting a flat ninety minutes is therefore wrong here today by 9 minutes, and wrong in the long direction — it keeps it open past its end. Across 2027 in Kolkata an eighth runs from 80 minutes to 102 minutes, so the error is not a constant either. Abhijit is a fifteenth of the same interval rather than an eighth, so it runs 43 minutes today — a little over half of Rahu Kaal, and it moves with local solar noon rather than with the clock. Brahma muhurat is the exception: fixed at 96 minutes because it is defined as a span before sunrise rather than a fraction of daylight, so in Kolkata it shifts with sunrise and never changes length.

Where 21 December sits in Kolkata’s year

10h 45m of daylight is Kolkata’s shortest of 2027, a length it shares with 7 other days, and 167 minutes shorter than the other end of the year, on 22 June. Against yesterday nothing moved by a whole minute: sunrise, sunset and the length of the day all held. That is what a table printed to the whole minute does with a change measured in seconds — it happens either side of the solstices, where the sun genuinely stalls, and it happens at low latitudes for weeks at a stretch, where the daily change is small all year.

Of the eight cities in this cluster, Kolkata is the 1st to see the sun on 21 December 2027. Sunrise across the eight spans 64 minutes, from 06:11 in Kolkata to 07:15 in Ahmedabad — and Rahu Kaal’s opening spans 66 minutes, which is the more useful of the two numbers and the one no national table can carry.

The five limbs on 21 December 2027

These five are the same everywhere in India, and they are listed here for completeness rather than because they vary by city — a tithi is an angular relationship between the Sun and the Moon, and an angle does not have a postal address. One caveat is honest and worth stating: the almanac convention is to read each limb at sunrise, and the tabulated values above are read at New Delhi's sunrise. Kolkata’s sunrise is 58 minutes earlier than that, so on a day when a limb turns over inside that gap, the value current at Kolkata’s own sunrise is the neighbouring one. The site does not guess which days those are; where a limb is close to its boundary the honest place to look is the neighbouring-day view on the national page for 21 December 2027, which shows the days on either side for exactly this reason.

21 December 2027 in eight cities

East to west, in the order the sun reaches them. The last column is measured from Kolkata, so this table is a different table on each of the eight pages that share this date.

The two columns do not run in the same order, and 21 December 2027 is one of the dates where that is visible: Mumbai sees the sun before Delhi and still reaches Rahu Kaal 27 minutes after it. The reason is in the fourth column. Both cities take the same numbered eighth on a Tuesday, but Delhi’s eighth is 77 minutes against 82 in Mumbai, and several eighths of that difference accumulate before the window opens. A shorter day reaches its own afternoon sooner.

Worth noting about 21 December 2027

• Because this is the year's shortest daylight here, the eighths are at their narrowest: Rahu Kaal runs 81 minutes today against 102 minutes at midsummer in Kolkata — 21 minutes of difference in one window, from nothing but the length of the day.

Questions about Kolkata on 21 December 2027